The communication to and from both home and office is undergoing a change to provide both cable and DSL broadband access. It is highly desirable to provide a common computer/software/peripheral platform architecture across cable, DSL, IEEE 802.11, IP phone and voice gateways. A communications processor architecture includes a 32-bit MIP processor, a switched bus architecture, a distributed DMA architecture, optimized memory interface, programmable memory management and write back or write through cache write policy. The software platform for the services includes device drivers (USB, PCI, Ethernet, HDLC, Timers, 802.11 etc.), RTOS support (VxWorks, Linux, Nucleus etc.), networking software (ATM, TCP/IP, bridging, routing, filtering etc.), network management (SNMP, web servers/stacks), PC drivers, and robust APIs with clearly defined software layers for customers to add value. A communications chip for all of these markets becomes costly. Texas Instruments Inc. built a product that has two DSPs for voice, all interfaces, a mixed signal processor, RAM, and a lot of peripherals, a MAC, a complete segmentation re-assembly for ATM, HM interface, a broadband interface, memory interface and a VGA. The result is a product that has 256 pins and the chip becomes costly. This is also not very expandable because any time one tries to hook a wireless on that one has to put it on the memory bus and that means it burns up memory bandwidth which is critical to the operation speed of the CPU. This also means that going to the peripheral the operation is in the asynchronous cycle which is slow as compared to DRAM. A 16-bit bus could be added with 32 pins but that is costly and would not have much memory range. Many developers for products in these areas do not want to pay for such a costly chip and don't need all the functions. We have had to bond out abilities on the chip but the buyer has to pay for abilities not used. It is highly desirable to provide platforms for market segments wherein the main function is functionally integrated and an expansion capability is provided via a low cost, software compatible communications link.